Yoni Shakti: The Movement is an education and awareness campaign, founded in March 2020 by Uma Dinsmore-Tuli PhD. Its aim is to:
End the Abuse of Women in Yoga, and Reclaim Yoga as a Tool for Planetary Healing and Justice.
Imagine a world where all women and girls are free from shame, oppression and abuse, able to live in resonance with the power of their natural rhythmic cycles and in connection with their inner wisdom.
We want a world where everybody’s sisters and daughters are safe to pursue their spiritual journeys of reconnection, free from abuse. With your help and the help of a global web of yoginis and yogis, we have been ensuring women are aware of how to uphold their safety and sovereignty within the often oppressive and disempowering orthodoxy of yoga environments, and to give women the courage to speak out. The campaign, and the ongoing offerings from the Yoga Nidra Network, intends to dismantle harmful structures and beliefs that create conditions for the abuse of power in yoga teacher-student dynamics.
This is the central message of Yoni Shakti: A Woman’s Guide to Yoga and Freedom through Yoga and Tantra
With your generous support we raised over £30,000!
With your generous support we raised over £30,000 to create a range of resources to help survivors, studios, and yoga teachers globally with identifying signs of abuse and increasing awareness to avoid further harm. We have built a thriving facebook community with over six thousand members who care about this cause, and have generously shared their experiences of yoga teachers and spaces the world over.
While we are no longer actively campaigning, we continue to welcome you to our facebook community where you will find valuable resources and previous posts. We encourage you to continue registering your support for this cause and sharing resources in your communities of practice. The key campaign resources and content will be available on an ongoing basis to support your teaching and learning journey.
If you, like us, seek yoga and spiritual communities that are centred on deep integrity and care, and/or if you have a past or present challenging experience of abuse – the connections and resources we have gathered will let you know that WE SEE YOU, and YOU’RE NOT ON YOUR OWN.
supporters and counting (we want at least 1008!)
RECENT SUPPORTERS INCLUDE
We invite you to sign up below to show your support.
Upon signing up, you will get access to our full Campaign Empowerment Kit, be added to our list of supporters and receive our exclusive Yoni Shakti: The Movement newsletter.
The Campaign Empowerment Kit includes a comprehensive, practical checklist of 13 Warning Signals that, both protect the safety and sovereignty of women, and empower sisters to spot the potentials for harm within the often oppressive and disempowering orthodoxy of yoga environments. Also outlined are nine practical, simple and direct Calls to Action that can be taken when abuse is revealed.
Through this campaign, we aim to empower, educate, and resource the Yoni Shakti network of 1000’s of women to share the “Empowerment Kit” which includes:
1. Updated Preface
2. Womb Yoga Manifesto
3. The Thirteen Warning Signals of Abuse
4. The Nine Calls to Action
5. Compilation of Evidence
6. List of Corrections
by joining our private Facebook group, following us on Instagram for all campaign updates & on Youtube where we have a library of over 20 vdieos and interviews
We invite you to engage with the resources below, and share your impressions with our facebook community, or in your own communities:
The work of the campaign to date has been possible with the endorsement and heartfelt support of our Yoni Shakti teachers, our Yoga Nidra teachers, and an interconnected community of truth seekers and justice advocates.
We offer deep gratitude for each and every contribution, however small or large, and offer thanks to each of our campaign managers who have guided the community through fundraising, assimilating challenging revelations and stories, and community outreach.
It’s impossible to list each person by name, but the collection of reflections below continue to guide us to our why.
We honour these allies and amplify the important work they have done tirelessly to seek reparations for survivors and to raise awareness of harmful yoga organisations.
Josna Pankhania and the Survivors of the Satyananda Yoga Ashram Abuses
Ashleigh Freckleton
Project Satya
Jacqueline Hargreaves
Diane Bondy
Dr Mark Singleton
Felix Price & Diahanne Love Holder
Jane Austin
Jason Birch
Josna Pankhania
Laura Doe-Harris of the Yoniversity
Laurie Hyland Robertson
Lucy Arnsby-Wilson DPsych
Melanie Swan of the Sacred Womb
Yoli Maya Yeh
Yoni Shakti: A Woman’s Guide to Power and Freedom through Yoga and Tantra was published in 2014. A key section of the first edition was removed prior to printing because author Uma Dinsmore-Tuli’s hard-hitting description of the contemporary Yoga Industrial Complex as a ‘stinking palace floating on a lagoon filled with corpses and shit’ was considered too offensive to publish at that time.
Sadly, Uma’s censored prediction in that first edition has since been recognised widely to be the truth. The past several years have seen innumerable revelations and investigations of sexual, financial, physical and emotional abuses committed by teachers under the guise of ‘yoga’. There is now hardly a single ashram, school or yoga institution that has not been exposed to be harbouring these harms. The abusive power dynamics common to many individual yoga teachers and gurus have also been reported by brave women who have spoken up, and Uma Dinsmore-Tuli, like lots of other women in yoga, had heard too many of these stories to keep quiet any longer. Through the revised publication of the book, and through the campaign, Uma remains fully committed to sharing the evidence presented to her, including the names of teachers and places that she wouldn’t want anybody’s sisters or daughters to go to. Her intention with this campaign is to educate yoga practitioners, teachers and yoga teacher trainers worldwide to call out existing harm and to prevent future abuses of power.
The uncensored and revised new edition of Yoni Shakti includes a practical checklist of warning signals to protect women in yoga, and a new Warning Prologue sharing a number of powerful statements in verse and prose. It also presents a comprehensive list of organisations and individuals that have harmed women and girls under the guise of the spiritual teachings of yoga. Yoni Shakti is currently out of print, but it is available in Kindle version online here.
Jai Maa! Thank you for your interest in this work.Please sign up below if you'd like to receive one or both of our monthly newsletters.